The present disclosure relates to media rendering applications for networked devices and, in particular, for techniques to synchronize media rendering to mimic broadcast delivery operations.
Modern communication networks support delivery of a host of different types of data, including video data. In many applications, particularly where video is consumed by an audience at a single display device, skews in network delivery and rendering of the video does not adversely affect the viewing experience. Consider an example where three separate audiences reviewing a common media item at three separate locations. Even where the audiences are viewing a “live” video feed, the audiences' viewing experiences may not be adversely affected if rendering of video for audience 1 occurs one second before rendering of the same video for audience 2 and three seconds before rendering of the video for audience 3.
If the three audiences, however, are attempting to review the video in concert with each other and are in communication with each other (for example, by an audio conference), such skews may affect the viewing experience. Commentary by one audience member may be difficult to understand if, for example, the commentary relates to video that has not yet been presented to other audience members at other locations or if the commentary relates to video that was rendered so long ago that audience members at the other locations have difficulty remembering its content.
Media delivery protocols often require rendering terminals to make requests of media servers for media content that will be rendered. A single media item may be segmented into a variety of delivery units (“segments”) that are individually requested by a terminal, downloaded and buffered for decode and rendering. When two terminals or more render a common media item, each terminal requests segments from a media server independently of whatever requests are made by other terminals. There is no known technique to synchronize adequately media rendering operations in such systems.